First look: Fedora 15 arrives with GNOME 3.0 and systemd

The Fedora project has officially released version 15 of the community-driven …

The community of open source software developers behind the Fedora Linux distribution announced this week the release of version 15. The update brings an overhauled desktop user interface and a number of noteworthy architectural improvements under the hood.

Fedora is a community-driven Linux distribution that is sponsored by Red Hat. It is released twice a year on a six-month development cycle and typically ships with the latest cutting-edge Linux software. Fedora is known for riding ahead of the curve and is often the first Linux distro to introduce major new features. It also serves as an incubation space for emerging Red Hat technologies, particularly in areas like virtualization. It lacks the usability and robustness of some other distros, but its unique technical advantages and high commitment to open source ideology are appealing to system administrators, software developers, and software freedom advocates.

The most significant user-facing change in Fedora 15 is the inclusion of GNOME 3.0, a major update of the open source GNOME desktop environment. It brings a completely new desktop shell to Fedora that helps to modernize the user experience. The new shell is built with the Clutter toolkit and requires hardware-accelerated rendering in order to operate. Fedora fortunately does a pretty good job of handling it with open source drivers on many hardware configurations.

The new GNOME brings an enormous number of changes to Fedora that are too numerous to address in this article. Readers who want to know more about the GNOME 3.0 user experience can refer to our full review of the desktop environment. Because Fedora offers the cleanest and most upstream-aligned GNOME 3.0 configuration, we recommend it to readers who want to go hands-on with the desktop environment.

The new GNOME 3.0 desktop in Fedora 15

A number of other prominent software applications got rolled over to major new versions in Fedora 15. Firefox 4, which was released in March, is included by default. LibreOffice 3.3, which was released in January, has replaced OpenOffice.org as the standard office suite in Fedora.

There are a number of user-facing technical improvements in Fedora 15. One is a new crash reporting utility that can use remote servers hosted by the Fedora project to do coredump tracing. This allows users to supply highly detailed backtraces in automated crash reports without having to have debug symbols available locally. It will make it easier for upstream developers to troubleshoot software bugs.

The SELinux Troubleshooter, which was originally introduced in Fedora Core 6, has been overhauled for Fedora 15. The new version will hopefully make it easier to detect and resolve conflicts caused by the platform's somewhat temperamental security framework. It's a step forward, but I still prefer to simply disable SELinux when I use Fedora.

Under the hood, the most significant advancement in Fedora 15 is the addition of systemd, a new init system developed by Red Hat's Lennart Poettering, the creator of PulseAudio. It was initially planned for inclusion in Fedora 14, but got pushed back to 15 so that it would have more time to mature.

Because systemd has a number of substantial differences from Upstart and the traditional SysV init, it has some far-reaching implications for the boot process and service management. It uses a dependency system (rather than the event-based approach of Upstart) and on-demand service activation to govern how services are initialized. It has made it easier to further parallelize service initialization at startup, producing some modest improvements to boot performance.

Fedora is the first major distro to adopt systemd as part of the standard installation, but openSUSE and a number of others are planning to do so in the future. In a bid to further advance the reach of systemd and open the door for tighter integration between various layers of the Linux desktop stack, Poettering recently proposed systemd as an external dependency for GNOME.

The proposal proved to be controversial and failed to gain consensus support due to the Linux-centric nature of systemd and lack of widespread distro acceptance. The controversy has generated a lot of curiosity about systemd among Linux enthusiasts. Fedora 15 offers users an opportunity to see how it works in production.

In addition to systemd, another intriguing new feature under the hood is experimental support for the btrfs file system. It's available as an option in the full installer (not the live images), but isn't used by default. Btrfs will eventually replace Ext4 as the default file system in future versions, but it's still not yet ready for serious production use. As such, the feature is offered in Fedora 15 as a preview and isn't really recommended.

The Fedora enthusiasts among our readers tend to be really interested in the distro's virtualization functionality. There are a handful of improvements in this area that are worthy of note. Spice, a technology for network-transparent access to virtualized environments that was first introduced in Fedora 14, is now fully supported through the virt-manager interface in Fedora 15.

Another great new feature that will interest virtualization fans is BoxGrinder, a tool suite for generating virtual appliances in various formats from definition files. It's not as sexy as Novell's intuitive SUSE Studio, but it gets the job done with very little hassle. The definition files use a really simple YAML-based format that is easy to learn and programmatically manipulate.

Fedora 15 is a nice release with some welcome improvements. GNOME users who are looking forward to the next-generation desktop experience will find it particularly pleasing. As usual, there are also plenty of shiny new features under the hood that will satisfy Fedora's more technical audience.

You can download Fedora 15 in a variety of flavors from the project's website. There are installable Live CD images for GNOME, KDE, LXDE, and XFCE users. There is also a hefty DVD installer for users who want lots and lots of packages on disc. Fedora "spins" with specialized configurations are also available, with themes like security, design, and gaming. The release notes can be read online at the Fedora website.

79 Reader Comments

The new interface must suck. I had zero problems loading up Fedora 14 into a VM....with 15 I get (don't have the right video power) and Gnome shell is turned off. Sucks. XFCE is looking better and better.

Systemd is suddenly in the news, and this is the first I've ever heard of Upstart. I remember smf being in the news years ago, as well as launchd. A good article about what problems these systems solve, how they differ, and their future prospects for success would be awesome.

The new interface must suck. I had zero problems loading up Fedora 14 into a VM....with 15 I get (don't have the right video power) and Gnome shell is turned off. Sucks. XFCE is looking better and better.

What you don't understand must equate to the interface 'sucking'..

It says right there in the article it requires GPU acceleration which your VM environment most likely does not support.

Systemd is suddenly in the news, and this is the first I've ever heard of Upstart. I remember smf being in the news years ago, as well as launchd. A good article about what problems these systems solve, how they differ, and their future prospects for success would be awesome.

Upstart was just Ubuntu folks contribution (Well the author was in Canonical's employ at the time.) - Basically it made sysvinit into an asynchronous sysvinit. It had explicit compatability as a major goal, making it a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.

systemd is a complete and total replacement for sysvinit - it provides an entirely new dependency system and removes shell from the picture in 90% of cases. It uses socket and bus activated startup for many services.

To the end user, most of the "benefit" is reduced boot time without losing any services.

Nice thumbnails in the article. The Fermilab article suffered that fate too.

In any case, Gnome 3 looks very ugly and wasteful of screen real-estate.

In what way does it waste screen real.state? It ditches the original two-panel configuration of gnome and uses instead a one panel configuration. It's true that the default theme is a bit chunky and uses a significant amount of vertical space, but that can be switched easily.

Nice thumbnails in the article. The Fermilab article suffered that fate too.

In any case, Gnome 3 looks very ugly and wasteful of screen real-estate.

In what way does it waste screen real.state? It ditches the original two-panel configuration of gnome and uses instead a one panel configuration. It's true that the default theme is a bit chunky and uses a significant amount of vertical space, but that can be switched easily.

Giant window titles, giant buttons. I mean, look at that Firefox window. It looks like it's gonna tip over it's so top-heavy. I agree, it's very ugly.

Nice thumbnails in the article. The Fermilab article suffered that fate too.

In any case, Gnome 3 looks very ugly and wasteful of screen real-estate.

In what way does it waste screen real.state? It ditches the original two-panel configuration of gnome and uses instead a one panel configuration. It's true that the default theme is a bit chunky and uses a significant amount of vertical space, but that can be switched easily.

Giant window titles, giant buttons. I mean, look at that Firefox window. It looks like it's gonna tip over it's so top-heavy. I agree, it's very ugly.

So use a theme with smaller margins, not like you can't do that in Linux

Can we please stop using grey for an OS' primary colour? OS X doesn't look good with this and neither does that Finder ripoff look. It's 2011. We have colour monitors. Use them.

Agreed.

Also another distro which you can try out (and one that doesn't crash as often as Fedora) is Arch, they generally leave most packages vanilla, and that way you get the same experience as stock Gnome 3.

Also remember that the fallback mode can still be used in conjuction with Compiz.

Can we please stop using grey for an OS' primary colour? OS X doesn't look good with this and neither does that Finder ripoff look. It's 2011. We have colour monitors. Use them.

Agreed.

Also another distro which you can try out (and one that doesn't crash as often as Fedora) is Arch, they generally leave most packages vanilla, and that way you get the same experience as stock Gnome 3.

Also remember that the fallback mode can still be used in conjuction with Compiz.

Fedora is rather vanilla in fact. Arch's "benefit" is they leave out some of the optional dependencies. Arch's negative is that they use BSD init.

As a recent ubuntu convert to Fedora, I must say, it is actually not as polished as Ubuntu, but still quite a nice distro (I taught myself to stop caring about package format). I absolutely love gnome3 and only hope it gets even more awesome much faster.

As a recent ubuntu convert to Fedora, I must say, it is actually not as polished as Ubuntu, but still quite a nice distro (I taught myself to stop caring about package format). I absolutely love gnome3 and only hope it gets even more awesome much faster.

I would love to use Ubuntu if they were more community contributors and less users.

As a recent ubuntu convert to Fedora, I must say, it is actually not as polished as Ubuntu, but still quite a nice distro (I taught myself to stop caring about package format). I absolutely love gnome3 and only hope it gets even more awesome much faster.

I would love to use Ubuntu if they were more community contributors and less users.

I understand wanting more contributors, but why less users? A large user base is a large test base, and people using ANY linux distro (generally speaking) know how to let Canonical know if there's an issue (or let the guy who installed it for them know).

I've dabbled with different distros for many years but still can't seem to make the switch. WMC and netflix compatibility (and sometimes games) are the current killer apps for me.

Fedora community has been in quite an uproar lately. One of the issues mentioned more then once has been a rushed adoption of Gnome 3. I tend to agree.

Gnome 3 is introducing some very big changes not only to how it looks but also to how it functions. The entire implementation feels to be oriented at touch screens (read: tablets), with giant buttons, mouse gesture menus lack of right-click functionality. I can't help but feel this leaves the Desktop users wanting.

Unless you are using your computer to consume media I do not see the gains of the new UI. This ties in with the issue people keep coming back to. Fedora is not supposed to be Ubuntu, the entire concept of "Linux for human beings" is not their moto. Its supposeed to be all about new tech, experimental software, free software. Quite a different agenda, you must agree. Where does a DE which looks like it was built for a 6 year old (giant buttons, bright colours, sliding menus) fit in?

Of course this is Linux, and you can change UI with a power of few commands, but we all know the power of the brand/logo/image. Its the OOB look and feel that often defines the distro for new users. Since if we don't address OOB appearance/applications, well apart from package manager, we are left with the same Linux Kernel everytime.

So unfortunately I side with those who say Fedora is suffering from the case of dual-identity. It is not constructive, but in my eyes true. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas

As much as I wanted to love it, Gnome 3 makes multitasking harder for me. And so far it has presented no advantages whatsoever.XFCE (or just Gnome 3 'fallback') + Bluetile stands heads and shoulders above it when trying to get some actual work done.

Hopefully being widely adopted means major improvements faster, but it seems to me the philosophy behind Gnome 3 is at odds with multitasking, so I have my doubts if it will ever be really good.Even when browsing Ars, I usually have at the very least Skype running. Gnome 3 is now the only platform where I can't see my status and new messages without touching a key or cursor.

Unless you are using your computer to consume media I do not see the gains of the new UI. This ties in with the issue people keep coming back to. Fedora is not supposed to be Ubuntu, the entire concept of "Linux for human beings" is not their moto. Its supposeed to be all about new tech, experimental software, free software. Quite a different agenda, you must agree. Where does a DE which looks like it was built for a 6 year old (giant buttons, bright colours, sliding menus) fit in?

Wouldn't Gnome3 qualify as new tech, experimental software, and free software? It might be *bad* new tech, but that's the direction Gnome has chosen. Keeping up with the latest version fits with Fedora' bleeding edge nature, IMO. I guess they could switch to something else, but Gnome has been the default Red Hat DE since before Fedora existed so that would be a drastic change too.

Systemd is suddenly in the news, and this is the first I've ever heard of Upstart. I remember smf being in the news years ago, as well as launchd. A good article about what problems these systems solve, how they differ, and their future prospects for success would be awesome.

Upstart was just Ubuntu folks contribution (Well the author was in Canonical's employ at the time.) -

Upstart is used on formerly Palm's, now HP's, WebOS. So it has quite a feather in it's cap there for being field tested.

Gnome 3 ofc wouldn't work in a virtual machine, wouldn't work on a Geforce 2 and wouldn't work on a Sempron with a Geforce 8800. That just leaves my Macbook and my main machine to test it on, but I really don't need it on either of those.

I can't figure out why the push to move to systemd. sysvinit worked just fine, was dead simple and easy to work with. Now all the stuff is in xml files that are hard to understand. It also appears to make it much harder to do after installation configuration for things like cloning, which becomes a problem for VDI. There is also the added dependencies, which may cause problems if you want a completely stripped down OS, say for an appliance.

I tried this out and while I love the new interface, it was so buggy as to be unusable. Wireless never worked (apparently there's some broadcom issue as well as problems with hidden wireless) and the Activities button worked only 1/3 times (it would light up showing it received the press but wouldn't do anything). The UI is fantastic - an amazing new take on using workspaces as well, but those bugs make it useless.

I can't figure out why the push to move to systemd. sysvinit worked just fine, was dead simple and easy to work with. Now all the stuff is in xml files that are hard to understand. It also appears to make it much harder to do after installation configuration for things like cloning, which becomes a problem for VDI. There is also the added dependencies, which may cause problems if you want a completely stripped down OS, say for an appliance.

The reason why the push is because it is so much easier to use and runs better than sysvinit and all the shell scripts. I'm not sure where you got the information that it was full of XML files, configuration is done using easy to understand and well documented INI style files. In some ways the config files for services are vaguely similar to .desktop files which are now standard for program launching.

All of you commenting about wanting information on systemd: Read Lennart's blog http://0pointer.de/blog where he describes both its purpose and its use. I came away from those articles convinced that this is a brilliant project, and far more than yet another replacement for sysvinit. The point is not just shaving a few seconds off of bootup; No, the point is completely rethinking the operations of spawning, killing, and reloading of system services in an efficient, predictable, distro-independent manner and without losing incoming data.

Gnome 3 is in .0 release, it will likely improve the default theme quite a lot. To be honest, it doesn't actualy fit into my intended usage. I use a terminal window and the keyboard to do everything that's not IN the application I'm using. Now in the application I may use the mouse, but I don't use it for moving between windows and things like that.

systemd is fantastic, and I can only hope that maybe launchd will finish moving in a systemd like manner.

As a recent ubuntu convert to Fedora, I must say, it is actually not as polished as Ubuntu, but still quite a nice distro (I taught myself to stop caring about package format). I absolutely love gnome3 and only hope it gets even more awesome much faster.

I would love to use Ubuntu if they were more community contributors and less users.

I understand wanting more contributors, but why less users? A large user base is a large test base, and people using ANY linux distro (generally speaking) know how to let Canonical know if there's an issue (or let the guy who installed it for them know).

I've dabbled with different distros for many years but still can't seem to make the switch. WMC and netflix compatibility (and sometimes games) are the current killer apps for me.

That said, I'd like to try this out.

I was being ironic. Ubuntu ends up being more of a "user" of OSS because they don't make enough of a contribution - mainly because they develop stuff in private then try to push huge changes into other projects, who then refuse to accept gigantic chances - then the Ubuntu people say, look we are "trying" to contribute, but they are just all jealous of our success.

I downloaded and installed Fedora 15 a few hours ago. I have not actually found a usable configuration yet. Being unable to do anything with the desktop is beyond unforgivable. Gnome 3 is an atrocious mess that stifles productivity. I don't know what they were thinking, but they certainly weren't paying attention to making users more productive. Things that were one or two clicks away have been buried in the menus just like how things were done in Vista. There does not appear to be a way to put Gnome 2 back in the system, and the XFCE loadout doesn't seem to understand the concept of shutting down the system.

Chief complaints that drive me away from Gnome 3:1) The desktop is locked in an empty state. I like putting files and shortcuts there. You cannot do this.2) There is no quick launch bar. You have to go to the activities menu to see it.3) All applications are consumed under the activities menu requiring an additional click on the applications tab. Rather than being a click or two away now I have to go to activities, click on applications, hunt for my application in the list, or filter on the right. This is Vista-like hiding of commonly used things.4) You cannot change the theme or aspects of it. The enormous title bars, lack of minimize and maximize buttons, and top menu bar cannot be changed.5) What was wrong with check boxes? The on/off things take up 3 times as much space. This is a computer, not a light switch.6) The GUI takes more cues from Android than it does from Windows 7. 7 has a very usable interface where the things you want can quickly be put in front of you. Gnome3 likes to over-simply things as it if were designed for tablets and smart phones.

... my favorite change in Gnome3 is making the systemtray what appears to be a secondclass citizen. I gave up when I failed to turn off autohiding of the sytray in half an hour.I can see the interface working well for some tasks on some devices. But for an even slightly complex workflow on a large monitor it is a piece of shit at the moment.Maybe the good old 'start-menu' concept needed an overhaul, but filling the entire monitor with gigantic icons in a grid definitely isn't the way to go (great way to make the icons move as far as possible when adding or removing items in the menu btw).

I am very disappointed with the release. Hopefully the underlying tech is good and flexible enough that something great will come of it all.

I'm really not sure what the Gnome team was thinking. They basically took OS X's interface and made it less functional and uglier. The rough equivalent (less functional) dock is hidden, and the top bar is mostly just wasted space. At least OS X puts that to use for menus, notifications, etc.

I might be able to forgive some of the usability issues if they were actually making more space available to get work done, but they instead chose to waste tons of space with gigantic, broken-looking buttons and title bars.

I don't know that it's necessarily a bad interface, so much as the wrong interface for desktop use. I can sort of imagine it being pretty nice on a tablet or something (with some slight changes).

My reaction to both Gnome 3 and Ubuntu's Ubiquity was to switch all my systems to Debian Squeeze, and settle in for what I expect to be a long time before there's a better desktop Linux distribution available. I'm planning under the assumption it will be two years or more until there's a new Linux distribution that is anything but a backwards step from Gnome 2.30 plus KDE 4.5, best case. The infamous "year of Linux on the desktop" seems further away now than it has been in a long time.

Everyone seems to have jumped on the "dumb it down, waste space, and make it a pain to use for actual work" bandwagon. The only major OS that I haven't seen effected much is Windows, but that's probably just because Microsoft has such a long product cycle compared to Ubuntu/Fedora/Apple/etc.

Chief complaints that drive me away from Gnome 3:1) The desktop is locked in an empty state. I like putting files and shortcuts there. You cannot do this.

This will make more sense in future; the idea is that allowing people to put stuff on the desktop results in it becoming that hideous dumping ground you see on people's computers that have 400 icons on the desktop because the only way they know of to handle downloads or attachments is 'dump it on the desktop then double click it'. The intention in GNOME 3 is to provide much better mechanisms for working with files, but for 3.0 this isn't done yet, so you get the disabling of icons on the desktop but not the stuff that's going to replace it. If you want an idea of what's coming, take a look at all the links from https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointOne/Fe ... dReminding .

BigDragon wrote:

2) There is no quick launch bar. You have to go to the activities menu to see it.

So, a few things here. One, there *is* the Dash, which is always just a Start key press away. Two, this is part of the overall idea of keeping the main working area simple, clean and uncluttered; one of the ideas of GNOME 3 is you really shouldn't need to be launching stuff all the damn time. Modern computers tend to have a ton of memory, and users tend to use the same set of apps all the time; so why not just launch the apps you need, and leave them there? If you suspend/resume instead of shutting down, you don't need to start all your apps again every time you start up. (Or you can configure the apps you use to start on boot, which is what I do). It's worth taking a step back and considering if having a set of quicklaunch icons and clicking them all in sequence every time you power up the system is really something you need to do, or just a habit you've developed.

3) All applications are consumed under the activities menu requiring an additional click on the applications tab. Rather than being a click or two away now I have to go to activities, click on applications, hunt for my application in the list, or filter on the right. This is Vista-like hiding of commonly used things.

Try this: hit the start key and type the first two letters of the app you want. You don't need to use the mouse to get to the overview, and the search box is focused by default in the overview, you don't need to click on it to type in it. In general the Shell works best if you keep stuff you really launch all the time in the Dash (or, see above...) and use the keyboard search for most other things. Mouse navigating all the way through the menu categories is really not something you need to do a lot. The focus is on making it unnecessary as much as possible. The reason for the full-screen, big-icon-based interface rather than Windows 98 style nested menus, btw, is that user testing indicated people actually have a lot of trouble reliably navigating tiny nested menus that pop in and out depending on where you stick your mouse. People often lose the menu they're trying to navigate, or miss the menu entry they want and launch something else by accident. Especially with inaccurate pointing devices, like the crappy trackpads on a lot of modern laptops.

Again, if you really refuse to go with the flow on this one, see above for an extension.

BigDragon wrote:

4) You cannot change the theme or aspects of it. The enormous title bars, lack of minimize and maximize buttons, and top menu bar cannot be changed.

Install gnome-tweak-tool (and the user theme Shell extension if you want to change Shell themes). It lets you do all of that. (The title bars get smaller if you make the title bar font smaller).

BigDragon wrote:

5) What was wrong with check boxes? The on/off things take up 3 times as much space. This is a computer, not a light switch.

One does not replace the other, they co-exist and there's guidelines on when to use one and when the other. There's been a general effort in the last few weeks to re-examine uses of the on/off box and make sure it's only used where it actually makes more sense than a check box.

Everyone seems to have jumped on the "dumb it down, waste space, and make it a pain to use for actual work" bandwagon. The only major OS that I haven't seen effected much is Windows, but that's probably just because Microsoft has such a long product cycle compared to Ubuntu/Fedora/Apple/etc.

This is another bizarre meme: the 'actual work' thing. I mean, what do you think the KDE, GNOME and OS X designers do on their computers? Play Solitaire all day? If you don't like new interface designs, fine (but please, understand them first, and provide constructive criticism). But implying they're the result of some form of active malice on the part of their designers is just bizarre.